Photoshop Tutorial: Creating Distorting Mirror Effect

This tutorial tells us how to distort an image using a couple of filters. The tutorial is easy, but very interesting.

Let’s begin with finding an appropriate image to work with, we can try searching in Google Images or take my picture it can be absolutely any image. Open the chosen image and begin working with it.

Let’s make our picture more sharp using Filter > Sharpen > Smart Sharpen with the following parameters, as shown in the screenshot below:

The result will be the following:

Further let’s enlarge the picture, as we’ll have to distort the image in two different ways, so we triple it, taking into consideration, that there is an original image. For this purpose we use Image > Canvas Size, as the width of the image is 1024 pixels, so it should be enlarged up to 3072 pixels, the image should be located in the middle of the canvas:

Now your canvas should look like this:

Fill the layer under the image with the background color #d4d8e2.

Now with the help of the Eraser Tool remove the edges of the background on the girl layer. We select soft-edged brush, opacity set to 40%, 250 pixels in diameter.

We should get such a result:

Duplicate the girl layer twice using Ctrl+J and place the copies to the left and to the right of the image.

With the help of Edit > Transformer > Flip Horizontal we flip our copies horizontally.

We deform one of the reflections using Edit > Transformer > Scale:

And then go to Edit > Transformer > Perspective and add perspective to the right copy.

As a result we get a feeling of perspective:

We treat the second reflection in the same way.

Select one of the reflections again and deform it using Filter > Liquify with next presets:

With the help of this filter we can deform the image the way we like, you can experiment a long while, but let’s choose the variant, showed in the screenshot below:

Now we need to enhance the image with several highlights to create a feeling of reflection in the mirror.
Select the Pen Tool and create a couple of distorted white free designs.

We rasterize the highlights using Layer > Rasterize > Shape and blur them with the help of Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with the following parameters:

We get such a result:

We change the Layer Blending Mode for the layer with the highlights to Soft Light.

As the glass is uneven, there should be shadows, we create them in the same way as the highlights, but choose black color instead of white (#000000).

We blur and change the Layer Blending Mode to Soft Light in the same way.

Now we need to add some sharp highlights. We add them in the same way as the previous highlights.

We add the highlights on the same principle, apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, but blur them slightly:

The result should be the next:

We change the Layer Blending Mode to Soft Light as well.

Let’s add the border of the mirror, select a hard-edged Brush Tool, 8 pixels in diameter, and color #616?7?. We draw the border while holding the Shift button to make sure the line is straight.

Let’s add the highlights on the border itself using soft-edged brush, brush diameter is random.

The second filter to distort our image with is Shear. We use Filter > Distort > Shear with the following parameters:

All in all we get the following result:

The highlights and the shadows are added in the same way as for the previous image.

Posted by brantwilson

Brant Wilson is a staff writer for the DesignMag network. Brant enjoys all things design and development, dogs, and candy. Brant is passionate about training freelancers. Learn how you can earn $125+ freelancing. Start learning for free now!
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